Four Leading Physicists Resign After Academic Critic Is Fired By Putin Appointees For “Truancy”

Alexander Gorsky from the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, or ITEP, is one of the world’s leading physicists and a critic of the reorganization of the academy by the Putin Administration. He has now been fired for going to the United States for an academic conference for “truancy.” Four physicists have announced their resignations from the academic council in protest. The Institute has been taken over by a Putin ally, Mikhail Kovalchuk (right).

Gorsky traveled to Stony Brook in New York to present a paper that was published in an international journal the year before. The ITEP administration ordered that he secure a cooperation agreement from Stony Brook as well as a security clearance for the talk. He said it was nonsense since the paper was published publicly the year before.

The faculty members denounced the firing as a pretense by new Putin appointees who run the institute who targeted one of their critics.

The scientists complain that the government has taken over their academy much like other areas of the Russian research and educational institutions. We previously discussed another such controversy. The Putin government moved the institute out of the state nuclear corporation Rosatom and into the newly created Kurchatov Institute Research Center several years ago. That center was then handed over by the Putin government to Putin ally Mikhail Kovalchuk. Kovalchuk’s younger brother Yury is the chairman and biggest shareholder of the Kremlin-linked Bank Rossiya, which was sanctioned after the Crimea takeover and is widely called Putin’s “cashier” as the personal bank for Putin and his ruling elite.

The scientists complain that the Putin officials have slashed their salaries while pushing them to secure commercial contracts. Gorsky was the leading voice in that criticism. Earlier, the same officials demoted another critic, deputy research director, Mikhail Danilov. Others expect the cleansing of critics to continue.

Putin seems now completely unchecked in such authoritarian actions. Much like earlier Russian strongmen, he views intellectuals with particular suspicion and they appear to be taken the brunt of the gradual aggregation of power in Russia. It is another example of how he and his minions continue to drag the country back to Soviet style management and policies.

Dredd –
Ignorance is catchy, especially in politics:
“The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.” (Will Rogers)

The one statement does not go with the other. Not that they are mutually exclusive, just look at Harry Reid.
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He was a pretty good boxer, and he has a sense of humor to go along with his dealing with 99 Senators, a good number of them climate change and racism deniers.

In his book he tells a story about a law.

It was a law to protect children.

The law was that brothels could not be within a certain distance of any school.

A case came up where a brothel was built too close to a school.

So they moved the school.

It was just down the street from where Saint Money-the-Edelson is worshipped by “thuh next preznit” (all the also rans).

You guys need think bigger! This isn’t about Crimea. It’s about whose money calls the shots in years to come. And it doesn’t look like it might be our own. We’re sending belligerent signals to China at the same time over more inconsequential territory. But hey, I hope those physicists can get a job over here! Those are the kind of immigrants that can help bring world-changing developments that can start right here.

I called him the “most dangerous man in the world” here way before all this latest stuff happened, a couple years ago. Faux intellectuals here mocked me. This guy is easy to read. He’s Cold War KGB right to his core. He has always wanted to restore the Soviet Union and the go on to world domination. Bush looked into his eyes and misread or misremembered what he read. Putin looked into Obama’s eyes and saw a lightweight bluffer. KGB guys smell fear from 100 miles away.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife of 30 years, Lyudmila,
are now divorced. Putin, an ex-KGB spy “keeps his personal life private
and little is known about his wife and two daughters, both in their 20s.”

Russians have expressed concern that removing Lyudmila from his official biography amounted to a Soviet-style attempt to rewrite history.

Putin is on a dangerous downward path now – ands Russians still want to rejoin the country – who in their right mind would do that ? The country will now spiral slowly into total vicious control as in past years, and the Russian people will eventually have another revolution. The US has it’s own issues of course with the concentrating of power into all the wrong places, but at least the law is on the side of the people, so that hopefully this country can have a reshuffle of power downwards without complete bloodshed (hope so) whereas Putin’s Russia is now doomed. Putin does not love his Russia, he only wants power for his own little bare-chested ego – moron !!

Justice Holmes – I have warned people about Putin since he got into office. I told people people he was he was not be be trusted and I thought “Bush was nuts to trust him, but maybe they had a meeting of minds.

“Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.” – Will Rogers